According to a new report that looks at how continuing improvements to artificial intelligence and robotics will impact society, 'robotic sex partners will become commonplace' by 2025. A large portion of the report also focuses on how AI and robotics will impact both blue- and white-collar workers, with about 50% of the polled experts stating that robots will displace more human jobs than they create by 2025.

New research shows that when we hear stories, brain patterns appear that transcend culture and language. There may be a universal code that underlies making sense of narratives.

Telling and listening to stories is a pastime that spans all cultures. From crime novels to bedtime stories and from ancient legends to spicy romances, humanity loves a good book.

We are all very used to the idea of stories, but the processes at work in the brain are more complex than it seems.

Following a narrative and understanding the story's meaning and themes, as well as the interaction of causes and effects across time, involves challenging cognitive gymnastics. But of course, our brains make it seem effortless.

Neuroscience has made headway in finding out which brain regions help us to understand smaller chunks of language - words and sentences, that is - but we still have a lot to learn about how the brain understands a narrative. Following a story involves a steady accumulation of meaning.

Machine intelligence is here, and we're already using it to make subjective decisions. But the complex way AI grows and improves makes it hard to understand and even harder to control. In this cautionary talk, techno-sociologist Zeynep Tufekci explains how intelligent machines can fail in ways that don't fit human error patterns -- and in ways we won't expect or be prepared for. "We cannot outsource our responsibilities to machines," she says. "We must hold on ever tighter to human values and human ethics."

For nearly 60 years scientists have known the chemical responsible for magic mushrooms' psychedelic reputation is a compound called psilocybin. What we haven't known is the biochemical pathway behind this famous hallucinogen.

Feel free to now tick that one off your chemistry bucket-list. German researchers have identified four key enzymes involved in making the chemical, potentially setting the stage for mass production of a promising pharmaceutical.

Psilocybin was first identified by the Swiss scientist Albert Hofmann way back in 1959, but has only recently re-entered the spotlight as a safe way to treat conditions related to anxiety, depression, and addiction.

As the evidence mounts, there could be a need for an efficient way to synthesise the compound for experimentation and mass production.

So a small team of researchers from Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany sequenced the genomes of the magic mushroom species Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe cyanescens to hunt for the biochemical components responsible for constructing this mind-bending molecule.

They had their suspicions, as early work on the molecule's biosynthesis using radioactive tags had already revealed the order of the steps required to turn a molecule of tryptophan - an essential amino acid - into a series of chemicals, ending up with psilocybin.

While the order is a little different than it first appeared, it turns out four enzymes are responsible for the entire process.

Knowing what these enzymes are as well as the genes that encode them is a boon for any future pharmacologist who might want to churn out buckets of the stuff, or tweak the secret recipe to suit their needs.

Using a system of electrodes, transmitters, receivers, scientists were able to restore leg function in a primate, completely bypassing damaged nerves. While this remarkable feat may be decades away from human use, it is a promising development for the hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. with spinal cord injuries

The rulings on online speech are coming down all over the world. Most recently, on June 30, Germany passed a law that orders social media companies operating in the country to delete hate speech within 24 hours of it being posted, or face fines of up to $57 million per instance. That came two days after a Canada Supreme Court ruling that Google must scrub search results about pirated products. And in May a court in Austria ruled that Facebook must take down specific posts that were considered hateful toward the country’s Green party leader. Each of those rulings mandated that companies remove the content not just in the countries where it was posted, but globally. Currently, in France, the country’s privacy regulator is fighting Google in the courts to get the tech giant to apply Europe’s “right to be forgotten” laws worldwide. And, around the world, dozens of similar cases are pending.

The trend of courts applying country-specific social media laws worldwide could radically change what is allowed to be on the internet, setting a troubling precedent. What happens to the global internet when countries with different cultures have sharply diverging definitions of what is acceptable online speech? What happens when one country's idea of acceptable speech clashes with another's idea of hate speech? Experts worry the biggest risk is that the whole internet will be forced to comport with the strictest legal limitations.

Tononi argues that this special “integrated information” corresponds to the unified, integrated state that we experience as subjective awareness. Integrated information theory has gained prominence in the last few years, even as debates have ensued about whether it is an accurate and sufficient proxy for consciousness. But when Hoel first got to Madison in 2010, only the two of them were working on it there.

A shadowy operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Leave campaign heavily influenced the result of the EU referendum. Is our electoral process still fit for purpose?

Manzotti: Perhaps it’s time to ditch the word “consciousness” and simply talk about experience....Your body is such a thing and when your body is there, an apple is there, too. Not an apple reproduced like a photo in your head. An apple there on the table, in relation with your body.

Parks: So, anything the body experiences as an effect—which is to say, anything it experiences—is an object?

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have figured out a way to extend the life of female fruit flies by 20 percent by manipulating what the school has called a "cellular time machine." The biologists who carried out the work are hopeful that their findings will have implications for human aging and help fight off age-related diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

The researchers focused on mitochondria, tiny structures that act a bit like digestive organs inside our cells. These "cellular power plants" take the chemicals and oxygen in our systems provided through food and respiration, and convert them into a molecule known as ATP, which the cell can then use as food. When mitochondria age however, they can become damaged and build up in the body, creating a toxic environment conducive to disease formation.

In the research, UCLA biologists studied the mitochondria in fruit flies and figured out that as the insects reach middle age – which, for a fruit fly, is about one month old – their mitochondria change shape, making it tough for their cells to clear them out when the organelles are no longer functioning properly.

Creating a huge global network connecting billions of individuals might be one of humanity’s greatest achievements to date, but microbes beat us to it by more than three billion years. These tiny single-celled organisms aren’t just responsible for all life on Earth. They also have their own versions of the World Wide Web and the Internet of Things. Here’s how they work.

Much like our own cells, microbes treat pieces of DNA as coded messages. These messages contain information for assembling proteins into molecular machines that can solve specific problems, such as repairing the cell. But microbes don’t just get these messages from their own DNA. They also swallow pieces of DNA from their dead relatives or exchange them with living mates.

These DNA pieces are then incorporated into their genomes, which are like computers overseeing the work of the entire protein machinery. In this way, the tiny microbe is a flexible learning machine that intelligently searches for resources in its environment. If one protein machine doesn’t work, the microbe tries another one. Trial and error solve all the problems.

But microbes are too small to act on their own. Instead, they form societies. Microbes have been living as giant colonies, containing trillions of members, from the dawn of life. These colonies have even left behind mineral structures known as stromatolites. These are microbial metropolises, frozen in time like Pompeii, that provide evidence of life from billions of years ago.

According to a survey of artificial intelligence experts, AI will probably be good enough to take on pretty much most of our jobs within half a century.

While there's plenty of room for debate on the details, the predicted applications of AI could serve as an alarm bell for us to consider how our economy and job market will adapt to ever smarter technology.

A team of researchers from the University of Oxford and Yale University received 352 responses to a survey they'd sent out to over 1,600 academics who had presented at conferences on machine learning and neural information processing in 2015.

The survey asked the experts to assign probabilities to dates in the future that AI might be capable of performing specific tasks, from folding laundry to translating languages.

They also asked for predictions on when machines would be superior to humans in fulfilling certain occupations, such as surgery or truck-driving; when they thought AI would be better than us at all tasks; and what they thought the social impacts could be.

The researchers then combined the results to determine a range of time stretching from a low 25 percent confidence to 75 percent certain, calculating a median point when most experts were hedging their bets.

Homo sapiens is a very moody species. Even though sadness and bad moods have always been part of the human experience, we now live in an age that ignores or devalues these feelings.

In our culture, normal human emotions like temporary sadness are often treated as disorders. Manipulative advertising, marketing and self-help industries claim happiness should be ours for the asking. Yet bad moods remain an essential part of the normal range of moods we regularly experience.

Despite the near-universal cult of happiness and unprecedented material wealth, happiness and life satisfaction in Western societies has not improved for decades.

It's time to re-assess the role of bad moods in our lives. We should recognise they are a normal, and even a useful and adaptive part of being human, helping us cope with many everyday situations and challenges.

A short history of sadness

In earlier historical times, short spells of feeling sad or moody (known as mild dysphoria) have always been accepted as a normal part of everyday life. In fact, many of the greatest achievements of the human spirit deal with evoking, rehearsing and even cultivating negative feelings.

Greek tragedies exposed and trained audiences to accept and deal with inevitable misfortune as a normal part of human life. Shakespeare's tragedies are classics because they echo this theme. And the works of many great artists such as Beethoven and Chopin in music, or Chekhov and Ibsen in literature explore the landscape of sadness, a theme long recognised as instructive and valuable.

Ancient philosophers have also believed accepting bad moods is essential to living a full life. Even hedonist philosophers like Epicurus recognised living well involves exercising wise judgement, restraint, self-control and accepting inevitable adversity.

Other philosophers like the stoics also highlighted the importance of learning to anticipate and accept misfortunes, such as loss, sorrow or injustice.

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